The Gutter-Cleaning Robot

You read about robots that can do surgery or play the fiddle, but where are the robots that tackle your unpleasant chores? One available now is the iRobotÂ® Looj Gutter Cleaning Robot. With this gizmo, you climb the ladder once to set it up, and maybe once more to retrieve it (unless you stay up there and watch it). That beats moving the ladder dozens of times, climbing up and down, especially if you don't have level ground to set your ladder on.

You can watch a demo video at the site, but this video shows the Looj working on a customer's real-world dirty gutters.

You don't want to be standing under this thing when it starts throwing gutter goop everywhere! The Looj won a CES Innovations 2008 Award in the home appliance category. It's one step closer to The Jetsons vision of a house that does its own housework. I can see this kind of technology leading to robots that clear out honeysuckle vines from under a fence row or auger out a clogged sewer. The iRobotÂ® Looj Gutter Cleaning Robot is $99.99 from the manufacturer. Accessories are available.

Miss Cellania has written for mental_floss since 2007. She is also the managing editor at Neatorama and keeps a small humor blog called Miss Cellania. In her spare time, she is raising a frightening number of children in a small Kentucky town.